Jarvis Landry was at a gala. He was sitting next to a woman who works at JP Morgan, and they were having a real conversation — about whatever people talk about at galas — and she had no idea he'd played football. She figured it out later. And when she did, he told her: "That's not who I am. That was a small part of my life."
I've been sitting with that sentence since we recorded.
Not because it's a surprising thing to say. A lot of retired athletes say something like it. The part that hit me was how he said it — not defensive, not wistful, not performed humility. Just accurate. Like a man who had done the actual work of figuring out who he was outside the thing that made him famous, and wasn't particularly impressed with himself for having done it. He'd just done it.
Leonard was in that same room — metaphorically — and he got there differently. Three in the morning drives. Church music. Waking up in a big house with everything he'd wanted as a kid, his kids happy, his wife steady, and still feeling something he couldn't name. "Why are you upset about like, why?" he said. He knew the words for what he had. He didn't have the words for what was wrong.
This is the episode. Not the money stuff, though we got into that too. The episode is about what happens to identity when the thing that built it is taken away.
The phone doesn't gradually slow down. It just stops.
Both of them said a version of this, and I want to put it on the record plainly because I don't think the people who haven't been through it really believe it until it happens to them.
When you're playing, the phone is constant. Tickets, favors, connections, people who want to be adjacent to what you're doing. You think of it as noise sometimes. You don't think of it as structural — as something that's propped up your sense of being needed, being relevant, being alive in the world.
Jarvis said it directly: twenty, thirty texts in the morning when he was active. Then retirement. "Phone dead." Not slow. Not a taper. Dead. The people who were calling for tickets aren't calling to check in. They were calling for what you could do for them, not for you, and when the thing you could do for them is gone, they are also gone.
What he said next is the thing I keep coming back to. He called it a pruning season. And I think that framing is right, but I also think it undersells how painful the pruning is when you're inside it. You know intellectually that the people who disappear weren't really there. You don't feel that. You feel the disappearance.
I lost my dad during my own version of this transition — not the transition out of football, but the period where I was being pulled away from it. And the thing that clarified everything, the thing that showed me who was actually there, was grief. Grief has a way of administering the test with no warning and no curve. You find out fast who shows up when you're not a useful person to know.
Jarvis found out during retirement. Leonard found out the same way. Neither of them said they were surprised by what they discovered. That's the part that stings — you already knew, somewhere, who was really there. The pruning just confirms it.
The delusion that money settles the question
Jarvis put the word delusion on it. I think it's the right word.
"From the outside perspective, I think that there's a delusion that money is supposed to fix everything." He meant the outside perspective specifically — the fan, the casual observer, the person who sees the contract number and assumes the player's problems are solved. Eight figures. Shouldn't be stressed. Shouldn't have mental health issues. Shouldn't feel lost.
What that perspective misses is the thing Leonard named: we've been doing this since we were seven, eight, nine years old. Not for money. Before money. The game was the structure, the identity, the daily purpose, the reason to wake up and do the hard thing. For Leonard, it was trash bags on, running steps at a park at seven years old with his younger brother, his father watching, building something that wasn't about a check — it was about survival, pride, forward motion.
When that thing ends, the money is still there. The identity isn't. And no balance in any account addresses the question who am I now? You can't compound-interest your way to a self.
I've thought about this a lot relative to my own post-football life. I've been intentional about building things outside of football — investments, business relationships, the show itself — and I'll still tell you that the transition had weight I didn't fully anticipate. The structure of the game is so total. Six, seven days a week, every decision downstream of football. Training, eating, sleeping, traveling — all of it organized around performance. When the organization goes away, you have to invent your own. And inventing your own structure is a different skill than executing inside someone else's.
Most people in the league spend zero time developing that skill before they need it.
PULL QUOTE: "Football doesn't make Leonard who he is. I'm cool on that." — Leonard Fournette
What you do with $19 million when you're 22
We did get into the money, and the most useful piece came from the draft position comparison. Jarvis went in the second round. Leonard was the fourth overall pick — $19 million, first installment within weeks of being selected. Different number, different pressure, same underlying trap.
Jarvis's philosophy from the second round was spare and practical: pay off the trailer, get mom a reasonable car, get himself something that gets from A to B, put the rest in the bank and compound interest, go outperform the contract. "That's how I handle it. And it's allowed me to be 33 and I don't have to ever do anything ever again."
Leonard's approach was smarter than I expected from a 22-year-old with $19 million. Mid-rookie year, he sat his parents down in what he called a financial literacy class — not optional, a condition of the money he was going to give them. His framing: "I'm not a bank. It's gonna stop at one point." Not from cruelty. From math. He has kids. He has a family of his own. He has investments he wants to make. The well isn't bottomless, and someone has to say that out loud even when it costs you something with the people you love.
He said telling his mother no made him feel a way. That's the honest version. It always feels a way. The question is whether the feeling stops you or not. For Leonard, it didn't — and he said on the show he wants to be the grandfather, the father, that future generations point to as the one who did it right. That's not an abstract ambition. That's the specific alternative to the specific fear of being the one who got it and lost it.
The piece they both landed on, separately: watch your account. Not once a month. Constantly. Leonard said it plainly — "They might go in there and steal 200, 100 thousand dollars. If you're not paying attention, you wouldn't know." Have the uncomfortable call with your financial advisor. Have the uncomfortable call with your family. The uncomfortable conversation is the one that prevents the catastrophic one five years later.
What I'd tell a player walking into this right now
Three things, in order, that I think close the gap between who you are as a player and who you need to become when the game is done:
- Start building the post-football self before you need it. Not at retirement. Not in year seven when you feel the end coming. Now — or as close to now as you can get. Jarvis is into photography, connecting people, philanthropy. Those didn't emerge after football; they were seeds that needed room to grow. The player who has nothing outside the game isn't just financially vulnerable when it's over — he's existentially unprepared. The phone stops ringing and there's nothing to replace the signal. The time to plant something else is while the game is still giving you the resources and the platform to water it.
- Run the financial test from the second round, not the first. Jarvis's second-round philosophy — conservative, compounding, nothing flashy — is correct regardless of draft position. Leonard had $19 million and still put his parents in a class before writing checks. The first-round pick who thinks the number is big enough to absorb the mistakes is the one who ends up making the exact mistakes the number was supposed to protect him from. The number doesn't change the math. The math is the math.
- Know the difference between the pruning and the abandonment. When the phone stops ringing, some of what you lose was always going to go. Some of it hurts in ways that take years to understand. The work is sorting one from the other without letting the pain of the loss make you distrust the relationships that were real. Jarvis talked about how the pruning season took him from twenty people he thought were friends to two. The two are still there. That's not a small thing. That's everything.
The woman at the gala didn't know Jarvis Landry had played football. And by the time she figured it out, she'd already learned something real about who he was. That's the goal — to be so fully the person you're becoming that the player you were is a fact about your past, not a claim about your present.
Most people don't get there. The ones who do started working on it earlier than anyone thought was necessary.